My name is Iva and I have come to CERN to serve as your new ALICE Matters writer. My journey here started in the middle of August with an internship in the Communications group, during which I found out about the opening for this position.

When it comes to presenting science to non-scientific audiences, you often expect this to happen in laboratories or in academic institutions, where people can observe how research is being done in real time while experts give them simplified explanations. This year CERN decided to take a slightly different approach and took science to a place where people would not expect it to be – in a shopping centre.

On the 1st of June Valentina Zaccolo from the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, presented her PhD thesis on “Charged particle multiplicity distributions over wide pseudorapidity range in proton-proton and proton-lead collisions with ALICE”, completed under the supervision of Prof. Jens Jørgen Gaardhøje. Her work has contributed to the study of multiparticle production in both proton-proton and proton-nucleus collisions, exploiting the unique capability of ALICE to measure charged particles in a very wide rapidity range.